Stats in your time zone

May 8, 2009

Andy Skelton

When we sat down at an Austin cafe in 2005 and wrote the stats system, Matt and I had no idea what we were getting into. He created the databases and drew the little smiley face while I wrote the code. We had milk and cookies. It was really cute. We were naïve!

I swear it was Matt’s idea to store stats data as daily summaries in Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), which is why stats days have always ended at odd hours for non-Greenwichians. But even if I seem blameless, I failed to champion your cause soon enough. It is even more my fault than Matt’s.

And so today I present a gift. If you have set your blog’s time zone, your stats reports will honor that setting (in whole hours from -12 to +14). This upgrade is retroactive to the beginning of 2009. It affects all blogs using WordPress.com stats, even self-hosted blogs using the Stats plugin (version 1.4).

The best part is that any time you change your blog’s time zone, the stats reports change retroactively. This works because now we store data by the hour instead of by the day. I’ve written lots of new code and Barry is bringing many new systems online to cope with the additional data, and we do it all just to give you stats in your time zone. We really do like you.

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Nightgunner- no, there aren’t. There are however countries that move their time zone forward 1 or 2 hours for Summer Time. I would guess that’s what these guys have been cool enough to take into account.

We’re on self-hosted and we sometimes get banned from the stats service ..probably because we break 100k+ pageviews per day sometimes ? Sent some emails, but didnt get any replies and we’re willing to pay for the service if needed.

Uh… they seem to be screwed up. I assume this is a temporary situation but on the “stats” screen there is a growing discrepancy with what’s shown on the detailed statistics screen. It was a 25 “hit” difference earlier today, and is now about 35.

By the way, realizing that stats are not everything (and other than a rough estimate on the number of hits per month is more than enough information), is there a way to simply turn off the stats?

Thank you guys for all the hours you’ve no doubt put into this. Sounds like an excellent feature, one that will make my entire blogging troupe smile contentedly. Even though our Canadian reporter might not savor it too much, since our blog is Brazil-based and thus GMT-3… 🙂

Well this is nice, but what I’d really like to do is to thank you for your excellent stats system anyway. Long ago when I was young and foolish I started a blog with that other crowd and I still have that blog because it has a million travel photos which are dear to my heart. That other blog doesn’t even have a built in stats thingy, you have to find one and put it in – all of which was very challenging to the aging brain – and it’s nowhere near as good as the WP stats thingy anyway. I love checking my stats, have made all kinds of helpful discoveries about how to raise my online profile by watching to see which posts get traffic etc, and have even made new online friends by tracking back some of my visitors to their own blogs.
So thanks, gentlemen
from Lisa in Oz

Ummm for some reason…my stats stopped counting today….is that going to continue to be a problem? At the moment…the daily number of visitors has not changed for quite some time…even though…my referrer numbers are changing. Solution? (or just be patient 🙂 )

Having the stats end not at midnight had always been a low grade bother for me. Behind being able to add polls to wordpress.com blogs, this is the best upgrade to WordPress in the 1+ year I’ve used WordPress.

I keep an excel spreadsheet of my daily stats. Today I noticed that all of them (recent ones) have changed slightly – but that the total has not moved appreciably. if you are “re-tallying” them from a different reference point, then they would all wiggle a bit day-to-day, wouldn’t they?

Keep working on it. Totally screwed up. I look at the chart and have the usual abbreviated page views, those stats that have been tanking since the “the big rollout stats project” , and the blog tables are showing no hits at all today. Can’t complain, I’m getting my moneys worth.